Recent research has found that linguistic cues may affect children's number word acquisition. Two studies were undertaken to evaluate the use of singular/plural markings and small number words in Chinese and English and its effect on children's number concepts. The first study utilized the CHILDES data and investigated how singular/plural markings…

Different views on the origin of deficits in action chaining in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been posited, ranging from functional impairments in action planning to internal models supporting motor control. Thirty-one children and adolescents with ASD and twenty-nine matched controls participated in a two-choice reach-to-grasp paradigm…

We discuss an innovative task used in teacher education--Lesson Play--that involves presenting a lesson in the form of an interaction between a teacher and students. We describe the motivation for the development of this task and, through specific examples, describe the iterative design process in which the task was refined and improved. We…

Although frequently used with recognition, a few studies have used the Remember/Know procedure with free recall. In each case, participants gave Know judgments to a significant number of recalled items (items that were presumably not remembered on the basis of familiarity). What do these Know judgments mean? We investigated this issue using a…

Binary cueing systems assist in many tasks, often alerting people about potential hazards (such as alarms and alerts). We investigate whether cues, besides possibly improving decision accuracy, also affect the effort users invest in tasks and whether the required effort in tasks affects the responses to cues. We developed a novel experimental tool…

Stimulus overselectivity is widely accepted as a stimulus control abnormality in autism spectrum disorders and subsets of other populations. Previous research has demonstrated a link between both chronological and mental age and overselectivity in typical development. However, the age at which children are developmentally ready to respond to…

We examined whether the cognitive interview (CI) procedure increased event recall in children with severe intellectual disabilities (ID) compared with children with no ID. Forty-six children with and without ID watched a videotaped event; they were aged between eight and 11 years. The next day they were individually interviewed using the CI or a…

Although much research has examined the development of orienting to social directional cues (e.g., eye gaze), little is known about the development of orienting to nonsocial directional cues, such as arrows. Arrow cues have been used in numerous studies as a means to study attentional orienting, but the development of children's understanding of…

This research examines the early emergence of source-monitoring abilities. Previous research has consistently demonstrated that children as young as 3 to 4 years of age do well on simple versions of action-based source-monitoring tasks. Research on even younger children, however, remains lacking. In this study we examined whether 2 1/2-year-olds…

We studied risky choices in preschoolers, elementary schoolers, and adults using an information board paradigm crossing two options with two cues that differ in their probability of making valid predictions (p = 0.50 vs. p = 0.83). We also varied the presence of normatively irrelevant information. Choice patterns indicate that preschoolers were…

We examined whether similarity, familiarity, and reliability cues guide children's learning and whether these cues are weighed differently with age. Three- to 5-year-olds (n = 184) met 2 informant puppets, 1 of which was similar (Experiment 1) or familiar (Experiment 2) to the participants. Initially, children's preference for either informant was…

Typically developing toddlers accurately follow an adult's gaze learn object labels. However, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) mis-map new words to their own focus of attention. Children with ASD and typical development participated in three word learning conditions. In the follow-in condition, the adult labeled an object which was…

Sexual cues influence decisions not only about sex, but also about unrelated outcomes such as money. In the presence of sexual cues, individuals are more "impatient" when making intertemporal monetary tradeoffs, choosing smaller immediate amounts over larger delayed amounts. Previous research has emphasized the power of sexual cues to induce a…

Central coherence refers to an in-built propensity to form meaningful links over a wide range of stimuli and to generalize over as wide a range of contexts as possible. In children with autism this ability is diminished, and the impact of central coherence deficits in children with autism have previously been observed using static measures of…

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual's semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals…